FTFA:Microsoft did say that the figure of 60 million could be attributed to upgrades and sales to manufacturers - so not sales of actual PCs to the end user.

I suspect the breakdown is something like this:00.1% - people actually buying Windows 8 by itself, to upgrade from something else.24.9% - people buying new machines and having no choice but Windows 8.75.0% - "sold" to distributors/retailers, so now it's their problem, not ours.

It was $40 and I had XP.

I thought about getting it for my wife's XP machine, but I like being married to her.

As someone who has a touchscreen desktop (I got an All-In-One a while ago, before it was cool... what's that? It still isn't? Well damn.) and paid the $40 to upgrade the day it came out (fark you, don't give me that look!) I have to say that this is objectively shiattier than Windows 7 in almost every way. And I have a touch screen desktop! Look, I clearly have a history of making stupid purchases (I bought a Xoom at full price when it came out, had a virtual boy once when I was a kid, a Sega 32x, etc.) but I almost feel worse about this one. Every time I boot up I immediately click (notice I didn't say touch) the tile for the desktop then go about my business using it as a Windows 7 PC without a start button. I know there's a way to have it boot up to the desktop but I never do it hoping that one day I'll want to use the tiles and corny bullshiat. I don't. It has added nothing to my experience. Not a thing. I basically gave Mircosoft $40 to make Windows 7 more of a hassle to navigate. Also, I had to learn how to bury my porn videos again, so that's always fun. In conclusion, fark Windows 8, I hope Steve Ballmer gets cancer in his asshole.

I cite your own post stating that at the exact same time in Win7's release it'd sold the exact same number of licenses as proof you are counting an OEM (i.e. Dell) bulk purchase.

Exactly how many retail, boxed copies of Win8 have sold. And your reticence to ever mention that in the threads you've astroturfed also confirms your paid by Microsoft, either directly or via a proxy PR firm.

I can't even be bothered dancing with you, you suck at your job. I hope you get fired.

Ha, there's a reason why I have you favorited as "paranoid." If you'd like, you can always privately message me and I can give you the main line into my office's front desk. You'll find out very quickly that I work in marketing and IT for an architecture firm (which is also why I'm heavily into renewable energy). Or simply, you can read my bio at a 3rd party non-profit where I'm on the board as vice-president. Unless the regional Emmy Awards are part of the great MS conspiracy, you can put your astroturfing paranoia to rest.

I honestly don't think anyone knows how many boxed copies of Win 8 have been sold - unless MS has their fingers in every mom and pop shop, best buy, newegg, amazon, etc. sales receipts. All they would know is how many units they've shipped to retailers and OEM box builders - and then they would know how many activations they've had. I do wish they'd share activation statistics.

If you think they're padding the books by shipping millions of dusty copies of Windows 8 to OEM's and retailers, it should come out in next quarter's earnings and reports. But the fact is that there's over a billion licensed copies of Windows out there. Roughly 20 million new desktops and laptops are sold every month. Considering Apple sells a hair over a million computers a month, 19 out of 20 million new computers have Windows on them. They've been selling at that monthly rat ...

Don't bother with him. He doesn't understand that an OEM sale is actually money that ends up in MS's pocket. For some reason he thinks that only end consumers who purchase it count as "real money".

theurge14:Yesterday I was handed an HP laptop and was asked to "fix it".

Turned out to the be the first Windows 8 experience I've had.

As a Mac guy I get the sense of the idea Microsoft has with this and I like what they think they want to do, but the execution of how to get there... ugh.

It took me about 10 seconds to find Desktop, it took me another 10 seconds to discover that they've removed Control Panel and everything else useful from Desktop. 5 minutes later I found out how to turn on the "Administration Tiles" on the main Metro screen

The scrolling is phone-like, the icons are terrible, the menus are too sparse, it's just too disjointed.

I went to uninstall Norton so I could turn Windows Defender on (the renamed MSE), but I couldn't find Windows Defender anywhere. I found the Search Charm, typed in Windows Defender, first result came up, clicked it, error message telling me that something else was already the default antivirus and I needed to go disable that first in the Security Center. Of course Windows didn't offer to link me to the Security Center, I had to spend another 5 minutes figuring out how to dig that up.

It feels like everything I really need is intentionally buried behind 5 layers of searching crap, while the crap I don't need has gigantic animated tiles for quick access. It's like running MS-DOS and not being able to type "dir".

I have no farking clue what you are trying to prove here. That a person who uses a totally different OS took less than ten minutes to do something on a OS he has not used ever/Protip you can get to the control panel from the desktopIn the left corner where the Metro/Start icon pop up just right click on it

Don't worry. Shortly an officially santioned Microsoft White Knight will be here to assure us all of how stupid we all are for disliking the metro interface because the desktop still exists and you can pull up a stunted version of the control panel and administrative tools by moving your mouse to the corner of the screen and right-clicking the invisible, poorly-documented button for it.

/ that said, getting your tech news from The Register is about as bright as getting your political news from Fox News Channel....// if you must use Windows 8, learn all the .msc files, a couple useful Powershell commands and all the keyboard shortcuts/// then you can be almost as productive as you were on Windows 7, and for only the small cost of an upgrade!